


As Coarse As Diamond

by dorkery



Series: Sankt Mariens: Prussia, Our Lady of the Land [7]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Character Study, F/M, Genderbending, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2011-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-26 03:32:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorkery/pseuds/dorkery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hard lines and sinewy flesh, white skin broken by scars and bruises and rough to the touch; that was his sister.</p><p>Part of the fem!Prussia history arc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Coarse As Diamond

**Author's Note:**

> Some introspection since I don't write in Germany's voice very often. Basically this like a love letter to Prussia. A really manly love letter. That Germany never posts. Or something. I'd place this right post-Reunification.

His sister was hard.

Hard lines and sinewy flesh, white skin broken by scars and bruises and rough to the touch; that was his sister. He would have liked to compare her to steel but she was not so flexible. She could not be tempered by a forge, could not be hammered into a different shape, not by fire nor force. She was not stone, though. She could not be. Stone was cold and calm and changed its form over years and years by clinging moss or dripping water. Hers was not a calm serene. Hers was predatory, calculated but never cold. She burned. Everything she touched seared white with flame and heat and disintegrated as she wished it. He did not know what she was, but he knew that she was hard.

To the touch.

And when he pressed his palms against the plane of her stomach, he felt how supple and thin and uneven the skin there was, by the nerves that spiralled and twined along taut muscles and scarred flesh. Her scars healed lighter than the rest of her skin, wiry like her fingers, thin like the flat of a blade or an axe. Her arms were strong, hard and muscular like the rest of her even if she did not look it. When she grasped his wrist and held his hand, he could feel the callouses and the cuts under her fingertips from long hours with a sabre and he marvelled at the difference in their skin.

He often wondered why she spent so much time in the training yard, practicing her slashes and blows. She was well known for her skill and discipline yet as the years pressed on, she only intensified her regimen, as though she was afraid that an hour lost would cause her flesh to strip away from her bone and she would break apart in small shards that could never be pieced together again. When he touched her, she felt so dense and solid that the illusion of her ghost-white hair and her blood-red eyes became the most real thing he could have ever known. She was unmistakably a man. She could not be anything else.

But there was a look in her eye, a tenderness that accompanied her swelling chest and the gentle touch in her fingertips as she stroked his face and kissed his nose that almost resembled fear, almost resembled love.

And her laugh, he worshipped it in its belly fullness and sincerity. It was deep and thick and often laced with warm beer and hot bread, spiced with camaraderie and kindness and joking and good times. In laughter, no one could know which illusion she chose to realise – was she a man or a woman? In laughter, she was neither. She was everything. And like her, her laughter was hard and unyielding and full of _meaning_.

She was hard through the years in which he grew, hard as a superior officer and hard as a sister. She coddled him as little as she could (the truth was she would always coddle him because she thought him her baby) but her discipline was as firm as it had always been, even from her youth. When he was a man, he finally understood why she had so tirelessly honed herself. If she could not have the natural brute force of a man, she would make herself stronger through sheer fortitude and bullheadedness. He never knew deeper respect.

Now, his sister was soft.

Soft breasts and soft arms and soft lips. Her scars still weaved through her body but they were no longer reinforced by hard muscles or supple leathery skin hardened and conditioned through mud and cold and steel. Her face was full now, no longer angular. Her breasts were plump. Her hips were shapely. And when she touched him, he did not feel the white hot flame of her past, but kindling warmth and promise. And when he touched her, she leaned into it like she welcomed it.

Sometimes, when he pressed his palm to her stomach again, he would feel the faint lines of muscle that refused to disappear like a testament of her industrious past. Her bicep was strong still, even if it melted away into womanly softness that he wanted to hold in his arms. She was enveloped in tired resignation, fear long gone now that she had no secret to keep, but he wondered if it made her truly happy not to hide. But she looked at him like she knew his heart and she smiled her manic grin, full of bloodlust and life, and that made him glad.

His sister, he realised, was not steel or stone.

She was blood and bone and skin and ambition. She would grow and mend even when she was stripped down and broken, grow in whichever direction she chose to with all the force of existence. And when their fingertips touched, he realised that the difference between them, though now levelled through years and labour and politics and biology and feelings, would always exist by even a little. Soft or hard, smooth or coarse. She was nothing more and nothing less.


End file.
